


our glorious futures

by The Stephanois (orphan_account)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack, Evil, M/M, Roommates, assholes in love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-16 18:57:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5837167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/The%20Stephanois
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You should have more respect for the Dark Side,” Ren tells him one morning.</p><p>This is standard breakfast fare for Ren, so Hux doesn’t so much as glance up from his grapefruit. “When the Dark Side gets a new PR person, I will give it due consideration.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a canon divergence AU in which Leia was successful in stopping the passage of the Military Disarmament Act. As a result of this 1) the remnants of the Empire had to go underground and quietly build political support within the New Republic and 2) Ben Solo was not sent away from his parents at the tender age of ten. He’s still an angsty Vader-worshipping twerp ~~that we all love.~~  
>  Oh, and I’m pretending the Hux isn’t 4-5 years older.

When seventeen-year-old Hux — spry of step but not yet master of the perfect hair parting — first found out that he would be sharing a room with the son of Senator Organa, his overall emotion was one of anticipation. Organa may be an ex-Alliance general, but she also hailed from one of the most prominent families in the New Republic. He just needed to bite his tongue and play his cards right, and surely something useful would come out of it.

Of course, then he actually met Ben Solo.

That first meeting was interminably awkward. The other boy hid his face behind hair badly in need of a trim and stole resentful glances at Hux every few minutes, mumbling like some homeschooled cretin. Hux quickly realized that not only was his new roommate a little unstable, but even worse, he was barely on speaking terms with his mother. He was useless, in other words.

And Ben Solo was a _dreadful_ roommate. He'd slam doors and go into dark funks that lasted ages, barely speaking except to snap. He painted his half the room a tacky black and let his laundry molder in the corner. The boy could lift objects with his mind; he had no business being so slovenly.

Hux lasted a month before he was ready to go to Student Services and threaten to have someone's job. But then —

One day he brought the wrong set of clothes with him to the showers and had to walk back to his room in nothing but a towel. Solo looked up and stared at him when he entered. Hux didn't quite understand what he saw at that moment – Hux's hair was uncombed and his chest was as pale as a stormtrooper’s wardrobe – but the next thing he knew, he was on his back and one of the first sons of Coruscant was sucking down his dick like he couldn't get enough of it.

“I'm not gay,” Solo said, approximately ten seconds after he had finished cleaning Hux's orgasm from his belly. With his tongue.

Hux snorted and stood, taking care not to disclose how shaky his legs were. He pulled on a pair of briefs and his most pressed pair of trousers before looking down at where Solo was still kneeling on the floor, his erection obvious beneath his filthy sweatpants.

“Relax, Solo,” he said dismissively. “I went to an all-male boarding school. It's just convenient, isn't it?”

Solo looked away and muttered, “Yeah. Convenient.” His brow was furrowed, dark eyes angry, and Hux could tell he was already sliding back into a tiresome sulk.

He sighed. “Well do you want a handjob, or not? Not there,” he added hastily, as Solo shot to his feet and looked like he was about to sit on Hux's bed. “Those sweatpants aren't getting anywhere near my duvet. I mean, what _is_ that, a mustard stain?”

Ten minutes later, as he watched Solo's face smooth out in relief, his semi-permanent emotional thundercloud lifting temporarily, Hux thought he could maybe hold out until the end of the semester before requesting a new roommate. To save himself the hassle, of course.

 

He couldn't really say why, four years later, he was still living with the ridiculous person. Ben Solo didn’t get better with time — in fact, if you consider the inexplicable growth of his confidence and ego, he got much, much worse.

“You should have more respect for the Dark Side,” Ren tells him one morning three weeks out from the university council election.

This is standard breakfast conversation in their flat, so Hux doesn’t so much as glance up from his grapefruit. “When the Dark Side gets a new PR person, I will give it due consideration.”

Ren drops his spoon into his cereal bowl with a loud clatter. “I’m not joking.”

“Neither am I.” Hux gives him his most condescending look. “You expect me to win an election by waving my arms about and going, _vote for us, we’re evil_? You might as well Force-choke the opposition candidate at the debate. See how _that_ plays with the centrists.”

Never mind that no one really represents centrists on the university council, what with them all being students and only concerned about things like segregated fees and which New Republic blowhard gets invited to speak on campus. But Hux plans to go into politics afterwards, and it’s never too early to practice pandering.

“If I did that, you might actually stand a chance at _winning_ ,” Ren says hatefully before getting up and slamming his way out of the room.

Hux stabs his grapefruit viciously with his fork. He just wants to rule the galaxy with an iron fist without having to cater to Kylo Ren and his spiritualist bullshit. Is that so much to ask for?

—

He proceeds to have a terrible day.

Those thin-skinned bastards who run the campus newspaper publish an op-ed proclaiming to the whole university that Hux is unfit for leadership on the council because he “lacks the tolerance for plurality that is requisite in a post-imperial academic community” — or something like that. He didn't read the whole thing; he has better things to do with his time than worry about what a bunch of raving bandwagon leftists thought of him.

And anyway, they’re wrong.

Hux has plenty of tolerance for diverse opinions. He hasn't smothered Ren in his sleep yet, has he? And he politely listened when the entirety of his Political Philosophies conference railed at him for endorsing the theory of natural classes. The way they'd reacted, you'd think he suggested indiscriminate carpet bombing of women and children (something he naturally would only include in private party memos — public disclosure of massacres is gauche, not to mention amateurish).

He arrives home after class to find the dining room table creaking under the weight of a melted pile of black metal.

“Ren,” he yells into the rest of the flat after surveying the twisted mass for a long moment. There is no answer, and he sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose.

Around the same time that Solo had started insisting on being called _Kylo Ren_ , he’d dropped out of the Astromech Club and switched his major to Art, of all things. It would almost be awe-inspiring, if it wasn’t such a transparent attempt at infuriating his parents.

“Ren,” he says, louder and more strident. “I'm expecting a delegation from the Yabol Opa Young Order tonight. What is this travesty on the table?”

Contempt works wonders in their household; he can hear a soft _thud_ and the shuffle of feet before Ren yanks open the bathroom door.

“It's called _Masculinity Unbound_ , and I wouldn’t expect you to understand it,” he says, voice muffled around the toothbrush hanging from his mouth.

He’s barefoot and shirtless. Hux suspects he’s been following the proud tradition of artists everywhere by laying about in bed until past noon.

“What’s there to understand? It looks like something you found while dumpster diving at a crash investigation site.” He waves his hand. “Now take it away, this room needs to be presentable when everyone arrives.”  

Ren stares at him for a moment, long enough for Hux to remember that his roommate could do some serious damage without laying a finger on him. He never has before, but the threat is always present. Ren is untrained but volatile.

Hux straightens unconsciously and fixes him with his coldest stare, trying to focus on anything except the sudden pinching sensation that comes when Ren has unfurled his power and is letting it fill a room. The tension is suffocating.  

Ren has toothpaste on his chin.

“Snoke’s on-world, you know. Visiting from the Jedi Academy,” Hux says, voice deliberately careless. “He informed me he might put in an appearance. I was going to invite you to stick around.”

Like most of his communication with Ren, it’s manipulation disguised as conciliation disguised as an offering. And it works — the suffocating pressure in the room dissipates. Ren starts and looks away, shuffling his feet. Down by his side, his dominant hand flexes and releases. Hux doesn’t think Ren is even aware he’s doing it.

“Yes, I’ll come,” Ren decides, announcing it in the same abrupt and too-loud manner that makes strangers think he has brain damage.

“Good,” Hux says, refusing to feel relief. “Now get that — _art_ off the table, would you. I think your masculinity might be a bit much to stomach on top of the dinner I have planned.”

—

The catering arrives twenty minutes before the guests are due, and Hux indulges in some retributive, vein-popping shouting. His father used to say it was a good workout for the lungs.

Five minutes into his screed, as the workers are moving in double time between the kitchen and dining room, Ren hauls him out of the room with a Force-backed grip on his upper arm.

Hux waits for Ren’s bedroom door to shut behind them before beginning, “How _dare_ you manhandle me in front of the help, do you have any idea what — ”

His words are cut off by Ren’s mouth sealing over his own. He makes a noise, irritated, and after a moment another one, slightly mollified. They haven’t fooled around in ages, both too busy with classes and extracurriculars. Well — Hux has been busy with classes and extracurriculars. Who knew what Ren did when he wasn't welding metal into gruesome shapes.

Ren nips at his lower lip lightly before ducking to suck along the pulse point on his neck. While he’s down there, he murmurs, “You know, you are very distracting.”

“Maybe you should just learn how to control yourself.” Hux does a reasonably good job at not sounding breathless. As if he’d ever give Ren the satisfaction.

Ren huffs a light laugh, making Hux stiffen. “I was talking about your screaming. It’s hard to concentrate with you throwing a temper tantrum in the next room.”

“ _You’re_ one to talk,” Hux says, shoving Ren. The other man falls back in an easy, sprawling manner, annoyingly confident that Hux will just follow him down to the floor.

Hux stares down at him and then at the door, through which he can still hear the caterers bustling about. He doesn’t have time for this; the guests are due soon and it would be unseemly to greet them with the flush of a recent fucking still coloring his face.

Ren starts to tense up, expression flattening to something tight and unhappy.

Hux curses and his hands fly to his belt buckle. Ren floats the lube from his bedside drawer over before he can even get a leg free.

Smug bastard.


	2. Chapter 2

The dinner itself goes off without a hitch, but Hux cannot shake the feeling that something is terribly wrong. And it all has to do with Snoke and Ren.

It's halfway through the meal, and Hux has been regaling the Yabol Opa delegates with the accomplishments the Young First Order has achieved under his tenure as club president. In the pause in conversation that occurs while the caterers switch out one course for another, he notices that Snoke and Ren have been having their own little tete-a-tete at the end of the table.

“Hux, you'll want to hear about the conditioning proposal we're putting forward at the next convention,” Elleren says at his right. “It would revolutionize militia recruiting and training.”

“Sounds fascinating,” he says, distracted.

Elleren continues to talk at him, but for some reason all Hux can focus on is Ren's head, bent perfectly forward to receive Snoke's words.

When Hux had heard Snoke was going to be on world, he of course had leapt to invite him. He was a prominent figure in the First Order, one of the few Force-sensitives in the party, and Hux thought it wise to court his favor. He figured he'd take the opportunity to suss out post-graduate possibilities.

So Hux assumes the disquiet he is now feeling is simply annoyance that Ren would take up the man's attention.

For all that Ren likes to rant about the Dark Side and his identity as a nonconformist, he has the same emotional starvation for acceptance and approval as a creative writing student. He'll fall over himself to help anyone who gave him the time of day. As Snoke is doing now.

“Ren,” he interrupts Elleren's prattling and lays a hand on his roommate's shoulder. Ren turns his head and blinks bemusedly at him, but doesn't shrug the hand off. “Ren, you must listen to Elleren here. He has some fascinating things to say about – what was it again?”

“Militia conditioning,” Elleren says. And a little tetchily, to be honest.

“Right. Great stuff.” He keeps his hand where it is for a little longer, just until Ren has turned fully towards the conversation at the other side of the table.

As he runs interference for the rest of the evening, calling Snoke's attention away from Ren over and over, Hux tells himself he felt jealous of Snoke's attention in the first place.

–

The next day he gets back from class and finds a note taped to his bedroom door. It reads, with a presumptuous tone and capitalization that could only come from Ren, simply: _COME_.  Clipped to the back of the note is a ticket to this week's university gallery art exhibition. 

Hux stares at it, his lips tugging back in an involuntary grimace.

Ordinarily, the last event in the galaxy Hux could be expected to attend is one of Ren's gallery nights. The last one he'd gone to had included a live theater component that rendered him unable to so much as glance in his roommate's direction without succumbing to a hysterical fit of laughter. This was completely unacceptable because:

  1. It's undignified; he heard one passerby remark that they were glad to see he had a sense of humor, which is hardly a rumor he'd like spread around campus.

  2. When Hux laughs too hard, his complexion floods a horrific shade of red that clashes with his hair.

  3. Ren refused to have sex with him for over a month afterwards, and no one should be expected to live with that cretin if they're not getting _some_ benefit on the side. 




Anyway, since then it's been an unspoken rule of the household that Hux is not to attend gallery nights. The fact that he's been just invited to one by the only other member of said household bodes very ill for the future.

“It's a trade-off,” is Phasma's verdict.

He'd gone to her immediately after receiving the note. (“To bitch,” Phasma said; “to _confide_ in, you horrible woman,” he'd responded.)

Phasma is the closet thing he has to a friend, but only through grudging long term exposure. Generally speaking, he likes her; she is ambitious and self-interested and therefore very easy to talk to. She's also enrolled in the army officer training program at the university and could probably bench press him one-handed. Not that he's ever thought about it or jerked off to it or anything.

“What is _that_ supposed to mean? Did I do something to him that I have forgotten? Did I take Vader's name in vain?”

Phasma simply gives him a flat, skeptical look from where she's lying back on the weight bench. “You had him attend a dinner party,” she says. “He's returning the favor. This isn't revenge, Hux, it's an invitation.”

And his life hits rock bottom.

“You'll have to go, of course,” Phasma continues, resettling her grip on the cross bar.

No, wait. _Now_ it's hit rock bottom.

“Why in the galaxy do I have to go?”

“Hux.” Phasma tilts her head up to look him in the eye. “It's the gallery's seasonal opening night. A lot of big wigs are going to be there. Are you really going to be pass that up _and_ risk offending Ren in the same go?” 

She goes back to her weightlifting and he goes off in a strop.

–

The night of the exhibition, the university gallery is a well-lit pressure cooker of sentimentality, pretension, and alcohol-swilling Republic power players. A perfect feeding ground, if it were not for the presence of Ren and his relatives.

Ren's family is, quite frankly, an utter nightmare. Hux only had to meet them once to understand within ten minutes why Ren is the way he is.

His mother grew up in a covert war zone and is one of those insufferable royals who likes to pretend class distinctions don't exist. Case in point: Ren's father, who was a common criminal, and not even a very good one. And then there's his uncle, the infamous Luke Skywalker – a patricidal freak of nature who spent his formative years as a water farmer on some forsaken planet in the Outer Rim.

Ren is what you get when a bunch of workaholic do-gooders from disparate and antisocial backgrounds try to raise a child; he's spoiled but somehow also neglected, sensitive but uncommunicative, and above all he's categorically incapable of meeting adversity with anything other than a full-throttled emotional meltdown. Is it any wonder he ended up idolizing Darth Vader, who reportedly would crush the esophagus of anyone who so much as spilled his tea?

For the first half hour, Hux does a good job of keeping to circles of strangers discussing the merits of whatever narcotized byproduct hangs on the nearest wall, but inevitably he is found by the enemy.

“So you're Ben's roommate, right?” Solo asks him, just like he has the last four times they've met. The man appears deeply bored and not a little uncomfortable in a shirt that looks like it's slowly strangling him.

Hux sips his champagne and has a brief but insane impulse to saying something like _actually I'm his live-in fuck buddy_. He quashes the thought, but it's a near thing. He hates not being remembered, and he's pretty sure Solo does it on purpose. Well, t hat's it.

 _Sorry Ren_ , he thinks, _but your father just got added to the list of people being thrown in prison once I've become Chancellor of the New Republic._

To Solo he merely says, “Yes, sir.”

And with that bold conversational gambit out of the way, Solo apparently sees fit to lapse back into silence. They both raise their drinks to their mouths and study the nearest wall, where a large black and white photograph of a homeless bum sitting on a Coruscantian Level 1 sidewalk was juxtaposed with a poor quality rendering of a Super Nova. The title of the piece was _proof._

As if the night couldn't get any worse, Skywalker joins them and immediately says, “Young Mr. Hux. How are your studies going – what was your major, public administration?”

Hux turns with a practiced smile. “Yes, with a double concentration in political theory, sir.”

Damn the man. He probably pulled that all from his head.

Skywalker has always made him deeply uneasy. He's suspicious of any one who hides their power instead of wielding it ruthlessly and to the full extent of their abilities; it's one reason he respects Organa. But Skywalker? He killed Darth Vader. He could, if he so wished, sway the fate of entire world with a crook of his finger. But the two times Hux has met him, the Jedi knight has presented himself with a quiet, unsupposing air and unfailing friendliness. It's repellent.

Ren thinks his uncle is soft and weak. But Ren is a fool, always blind to the manipulations of others.

“Why didn't your uncle train you?” he'd asked Ren once, back when he was still Ben.

The other boy had scowled. “My parents always said they wanted me to have a normal upbringing.”

Hux had to sit down for a moment to process the monumental stupidity of that thought. Like anyone from that family could ever be _normal_. Like anyone should _want_ to be. By not installing Ren in the Jedi Academy at an early age, his parents have inflicted upon the galaxy a volatile, untrained man child who might never achieve the greatness promised by his potential.

It was such a waste.

Hux is about to do something intentionally cruel, like maybe ask where Organa is, when a loud noise from the other side of the room draws all their attention.

A clap like thunder and then an erratic set of piano arpeggios accompany the sudden glare of flood lights from the ceiling. The lights linger over the room, momentarily blinding everyone, before they swivel down and spotlight an object being pushed forward from behind a curtain. With a jolt of finely honed dread, Hux recognizes the misshapen lump of black metal as the piece Ren had been working on earlier in the week.

The murmuring crowd of people draw closer to the exhibit as if they can't help themselves. Skywalker and Solo are both craning their necks, looking completely nonplussed. They don't appear to recognize the work of their Ben.

The piano noise crescendos unpleasantly. Hux is about to say something to the others despite his better judgment, except then Ren's exhibit bursts into violent ball of fire and the crowd is screaming and running and really, Hux was never one for the art world anyway.

 


End file.
